Page 49 of Sixth
Without a word, they slid from the cockpit into the narrow access panel behind the crew cubby, asliver of space wedged between bulkheads and insulated with old heat shielding—one of the few places aboard the ship invisible to outside scans.
Apex signaled and Core collapsed the disguise field. The tech gave off a faint resonance that Council scanners could read like a flare. He’d rather risk being seen later than let a machine tag themnow.
The disguises dissolved, letting his own face return to him, edges cut by shadow. Emmy’s borrowed features melted back into the woman he had marked as his consort by law andaccident and choice, hazel eyes bright even here. Lume tucked herself beneath the maintenance console and flattened her glow to a thread, the perfect secret in a place no one ever thought to check.
Boots rang on the dock plating. Heavy. Unhurried. The sound of men who believed no one could stop them because no one ever had. The scanner drone’s hum lifted like a hornet. Someone cursed. Another male laughed. The kind of laugh that meant hurt was coming and the inspector who owned it would enjoy givingit.
“Patch me their comms,” Apex whispered.
“Linked,”came the almost soundless reply. The voices came through the thin hull with surgical clarity.
“Search priority,” the commander said. “Alpha-One through Alpha-Six.”
“Sir,” an inspector replied. “Records show Alpha-Six eliminated on D-17.”
“Then confirm it,” the commander bit out. “Remnants, clones, offspring. Whatever is left, Iwant proof of termination.”
Emmy’s gaze cut to Apex. The Valenmark beat harder at her wrist. He held her eyes and nothing changed in his blood. “They think I am a ghost,” he murmured.
Core’s tone dropped to a thread.“Orders specify genetic reclamation if capture achieved.”
“They are harvesting us,” Apexsaid.
The footsteps stopped just beyond their hull. Metal rang from a knuckle tap. Then aflat palm. The drone’s hum deepened.
Apex raised two fingers and Emmy breathed with him, match for match. Lume slid from beneath the console, climbed the support struts with delicate economy, and pressed both forepaws to the vent grid. Her filaments unfurled like hair drifting in water. Blue light whispered over the intake, then shifted to orange, then to a heat Apex felt on hisface.
Outside, the drone chirped. “Anomaly. Warm signature.”
“Dockhand,” one Enforcer said dismissively. The commander made a noncommittal sound and the drone’s tone sharpened, wanting the truth, learning hunger. Lume changed the pitch a fraction and the drone faltered, focusing on a false trail that led toward the bay doors.
“False positive,” a second Enforcer snapped. “Move it. We sweep and purge the logs.”
Metal scraped on metal. The commander paused at the edge of their ramp. Apex could detect him standing there, detect the lift of the man’s breath through the hull. He slid his palm along Emmy’s forearm, and her heat answered him, acurrent that wanted to turn his head and put his mouth on the pulse at her throat. Not now. He wouldn’t. He heard her breath catch and steady, the sound small and furious.
A bright flare stung through the vent grid. Lume did it on purpose, flooding the narrow space with enough heat and light to spike the drone’s sensors and make it chase the false reading away from their position. Apex saw the decision in the line of her small body, the way she braced her hind legs and forced her glow higher until the machine turned. The drone reeled a fraction, recalibrated, then driftedaway.
“Too many ghosts on this station,” the commander said, voice sour. “Report any trace of Alpha unit, then move on.”
Footsteps retreated. The doors sighed. The bay found its noise again.
Emmy let out a breath that shook and then she caught it and made it smooth. He liked that about her. She never let anyone see how hard she fought to be calm. She only let him see it. He hadn’t asked for that. He took it anyway and knew that if any male tried to take it from him he would cut him and not regret thecut.
“Seal the hatch,” hesaid.
“Sealed,”Core answered.
They were two minutes into silent launch procedures when the burst hit. Core caught it first, aspike of encrypted Enforcement chatter buried under the station’s traffic feed. Apex didn’t need a personal comm. The ship’s AI was linked into every frequency worth listeningto.
Core isolated the anomaly and routed it through the cockpit speakers so only they could hear. What came through wasn’t a word. It was a waveform, dirty and buried within the Enforcement channel like a heartbeat under adrum.
“Split it,” he toldCore. “It is Alpha encryption,” Apex said. He heard the old cadence in it, heard the bones of his unit in the way the data came apart and went together again like a drilled formation.
Emmy’s mouth parted. “Listen.” She leaned close. “Under the static—it’s her speech pattern. That’s Hannah trying not to cry and refusing to let anyone hear it.” Her throat worked. “That’s my sister.”
Core’s voice softened.“Not archival. Live. Repeating on a distress cycle.”
Apex didn’t lift his head. He drove the decryption into the frame until the pieces stopped fighting him and began to align. Letters fell into place inside the light. Codes. Astring of authorization signatures. Two Councilors whose names didn’t matter as much as what they had authorized.
